


Lackluster

by Anonymous



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Accidental Cloning, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-02-14 17:05:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13012260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Desperate to cure his troubling insomnia, Keith follows a silver-tongued Unilu to a sleep chamber with the promise of complete rejuvenation, only to wake up tensely-rested and down eight-hundred GAC. Not to mention the unexpected Lance clone pulled from his dreams seems to be completely and utterly enamored with him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Very much based on those niche TRC fics where Ronan greywarens out an Adam from his dreams.
> 
> EDIT: I renamed the story (previously called “For I Am Sick With Love”) because ripping off an unrelated verse from the Song of Psalms is so 2000 and late.

The crick in his neck didn’t ease in the pod to the space mall. He rubbed his eye-sockets with a fist and ignored the tingles behind his lids. Hyperspeed was usually turbulence-free, but a blooming migraine had him sensitive to each vibration the ship shuddered out. It was approximately the ninetieth hour Keith had gone without sleep, and his body wasn’t about to let him forget.

Keith only tuned in thirty minutes into the flight, in the middle of another one of Lance’s diatribes. “I’m just saying, Killbot Phantasm IV is so much harder than the first.” The Blue Paladin had his legs kicked up over his armrest, belt buckle unlatched. The poster boy of nonchalance. “The boss battles take, like, five hours!”

Pidge snorted. “ _Harder?_ It took you ten days to get past level one in the first game. Did the fourth take you half your life?”

“Woah, woah!” Lance flung his hands up in the air, expressive. “Those ten days were non-consecutive, alright? I had other stuff to do besides leveling up in a dumb video game!”

“Like earning enough in-game gold for pretty armor?” asked Hunk, a clammy grip on his own chair. He seemed to be doing his best to keep his mind off of his motion sickness, which was more than Keith could say for himself.

“The princess dress has a maxed out resistance!” cried Lance. “It’s purely strategical!”

“I’ll be sure to congratulate Allura on the secret to her strength,” Pidge teased.

Lance’s response was to reach over and give her a noogie, quick and playful. In order to do so, he secured footing against the armrests and stretched, cat-like, too fast for Pidge to dodge.

“Gah!” she cried, and Hunk snickered in the background.

“It is duly important to wear the proper protective restrains, Lance,” Coran scolded from the pod nav control desk. “And enough willy-nilly! We must recall the gravity of this mission, paladins.”

“Willy-nilly,” Keith heard Lance whisper, and it was just one of those times when anything said would be hilarious even if it weren’t inherently funny at all, because both Hunk and Pidge burst into peals of happy laughter.

The mission was really a supply run in disguise. Coran and Hunk discovered they needed to replace half the ventilation tube equipment that’s been near collapsing for a good millennia, otherwise it was bye-bye to the sweet air they breathed. After so long, Keith was surprised that was one of the only things still rotting in the entire castle.

Almost expectedly, Lance and Pidge jumped at the opportunity to visit the space mall once more. Pidge more so than Lance, but wherever Pidge and Hunk were at, their third was sure to follow.

Shiro was the one who urged Keith to join them. There had to be a sleeping potion or pill or weird alien concoction somewhere in the universe that would somehow be right for Keith. If it weren’t for Shiro, Keith would have spend their free day going five rounds with the gladiator just to see if the tire would make him sleep. And most importantly, it wasn’t a pleasant thought, heading into Voltron with the risk of slow reaction times and possible hallucinations.

“Nilly- _willy_ ,” drawled Lance, whose sole purpose seemed to be to make his friends laugh. His goal was met, and if Keith cracked a unseen smile, it was because he hadn’t slept for ninety hours.

 

* * *

 

Keith wanted to give the Unilu the benefit of the doubt. They looked less shadier than the counterpart that Keith had fought his knife over with, wearing not a tattered cloak but a silver and white uniform, neat and clean. They hadn’t stopped smiling since Keith agreed to pay for a trial session, and although the money was his own hard-earned, Coran-sanctioned allowance, he felt no reluctance in handing it over. Keith had interrupted the middle of the sales pitch to ask, “Will I sleep?” and when he received the answer he wanted he practically threw the bag of GAC into their two-tiered arms.

The shop he had been led to was free from sharp edges and movable furniture. Beyond what Keith assumes was the reception area, he ended up in a U-shaped room with two large domes opposite each other. One was alight in a yellow hue, the other in grey. It made sense to assume that maybe someone else would begin their own session, too, same as him and within the same room, and yet there had been no one else in the shop save the keeper.

One of the Unilu’s many arms summoned a holoscreen from the air and pressed a few buttons, causing the yellow dome to swing open, a welcome apparatus. Inside, Keith saw a flat platform jutting out from the floor, spotless and plain.

“It’s comfier than it looks,” said the Unilu, noting his hesitation. 

Without another word, Keith settled in, facing upwards. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he laid them atop his stomach. The Unilu waited patiently for him, and, when they saw him still, waved an extra hand in a downwards motion. The door of the dome sealed.

He now noticed the entire ceiling was a tiled screen, and, unhelpfully, icons appeared as an array of choices on the monitor. Keith had already informed the shopkeeper of his limited time frame, and wondered what else they needed from him. Song choices? Temperature? He would never know, not unless the lions’ universal language translator extended to random spotty symbols on ceiling walls.

The shapes organized themselves, and then there were three clearly visible: one was a humanoid silhouette, except with as many arms as the Unilu. The next was a triangle, and the last, a circle. Because it seemed like the most digestible, he chose the first, gesturing with his pointer finger. Was it was to confirm species? Although the one he chose was two whole arms off, Keith was pretty sure he was no triangle. The dome pinged, and the shapes disappeared. 

There was a sudden weight on his head and arms, most prominently upon his eyelids. He fought against it, held onto his lucidity. But the lull was a flood he could not swim past, and when he closed his eyes, Keith was sleeping.

The dreams came not long after. They felt vivid, here, senses heightened in a circus of color. He was wearing his paladin suit, except it was white all over. A rain droplet fell on his right gauntlet, but when Keith looked up, there were no clouds. Only a sun, purplish in glow and larger than any star had the right to be. It faded further and further, until it was only a smear on the great blue canvas.

A heaviness was coming down on him again in the dreamland, an invasive fog impossible to lift. The suit was gone. His skin ran cold. Keith could now only see in scratchy film, in flashing moments, and besides that nothing could be heard but his heartbeat. 

Keith would have been terrified if not for the hands—the ones that kneaded his back, pushing tendons, drawing lines to his hips. Intimacy that felt familiar in the way that heaven was familiar: presumed and imagined. Following the fingers were the rest of the body, knowing and keen on a single intent. There was a scalding mouth at the valley of his throat, and buttery soft skin kept brushing against his own in a searing not-touch, and Keith wanted and wanted and wanted.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what kind of dream he was having. Keith had been having the same sort of dreams for weeks before his bout of insomnia, and had felt the shame as he wiped the sweat off his brow the morning after. But mid-dream there was no room for something like guilt, so when Lance kissed below his jaw, Keith splayed his palm against his chest and parted his lips, just barely, for a permissible gasp.

His dreams did not always present Lance like this, with limbs that ached to touch and a sliver of a smile. Sometimes Keith dreamed of Lance sitting beside him, sitting on that couch in that desert shack, simply being there to be there. Those times they do nothing but sit, the only shared touch coming from the press of their pants when their knees met, and in waking left no other emotion but a distant longing. This, obviously, was not what he had dreamt.

After a lifetime had passed, or as it had felt, a foreign sound creeped nearer, incessant, until Keith could finally make it out against the hollow of silence. Beep. Beep. Beep. The second he recognized it, the knowledge that this was a dream unfolded for him. And in that knowing, Keith awoke.

The screen above was flashing green. Words were present, but Keith didn’t know how to read the language. Session complete, his mind supplied. Come again soon, it possibly read.

As the door lifted, Keith sat up quickly, letting the blood rush through. He felt rested enough, though his shoulders and neck were stiff. Now, he only felt excited for the fact that it seemed like the spell of wakefulness had broken, because he had just slept for an allotted forty doboshes and hadn’t woken wide eyed and paranoid even once. He barely remembered his dream except for the tail-ends of it, and was feeling closer to calm than he had for the past four days.

The Unilu with a perpetual smile handed Keith a hot towel, which he took gratefully and pressed against his cheeks. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

Keith rose an eyebrow. “Um. Sure?”

Impossibly, their smile grew even wider. “How marvelous! I am also happy to report that the processing has completed, and your item is ready.”

“Huh?”

“Your item is ready,” repeated the shopkeeper. Their hands opened the holoscreen again, tapping this and that. Keith was missing something, and he hadn’t felt the loss before when he was fatigued, conscious of nothing.

The grey dome across from where Keith sat hissed open. It had, at some point, begun to glow orange. The door lifted, and then there lied—

“Lance,” Keith said. Or perhaps he thought he had said it, because it was the only word he could think in the moment. Lance. That was Lance lying on an identical platform, brown hair, long-limbed, a dream come to life. Lance. His sleep boomeranged back to him, of images he couldn’t scrub away.

Once it had thrown out the cotton, his brain whirred for reason. Lance had followed him, and decided he would also join Keith in a rejuvenating sleep. Of course, he thought. That was what happened. Lance also just happened to sleep in the nude. That was all.

As things had a habit of never going the way Keith deserved, Lance started to stir at the exclamation of his name, or maybe from the rapid exposure. He began to get up, groggy from the heavy sleep. Fingers came up to bear his fringe away from his face, and Keith was so shocked he stood without thinking, dropping the towel onto the floor.

A stranger would never have known, but to Keith, the difference in the shade of this Lance’s eyes to the original was as noticeable as a stab in the chest.

Dream Lance’s smile was already there, demure and sweet. His arms, familiar and not at all, circled Keith’s neck, hooking him in an embrace meant for lovers.

Your item is ready. Those had been the words in green.


	2. Chapter 2

“I still don’t understand how this happened,” Keith said, seated on a bench outside reception. The Unilu had given Dream Lance a silver shift that reached mid-calves with large slits at the side for his arms to go through. That had taken care of one problem. The other one at large was that Dream Lance had laced his fingers around Keith’s clammy ones almost assuredly, as if they belonged there. “Can you _let go_ please?”

Dream Lance withdrew, jerking back as if he had been struck. The contented haze he had been shrouded in faded away around him, and all of a sudden Keith felt like he had done something worse than kicking a puppy. He had strangled one. 

Offering his hand, he murmured, “Just for now,” and Dream Lance gleamed brightly once more.

The Unilu, whose grin had once seemed impenetrable, was bouncing back and forth worrisomely from their holoscreen to Keith and his new friend. “Nothing in the charts show immediate error. Has your item’s end product not satisfied you?”

“That’s not—that’s not it.” _Satisfied_ him? Probably not the best choice of words for the situation. Burning under his collar, Keith said, “I mean, I didn’t know _he’d_ come out!”

“Ah,” said the alien, as if they had deduced the root of the problem. “You had chosen ‘life form’ at the beginning of your session instead of ‘object’ or ‘intangible’. According to the scans, the only life form available for processing in your sleep visions was this particular specimen.” Their fourth arm, the only one that hadn’t been clicking and poking at the screens, gestured to Dream Lance. “Did you have in mind another item?”

“I didn’t know that was what that meant!” cried Keith. His exclamations didn’t seem to shake Dream Lance, who thought it a good idea to happily snuggle at his shoulder. A seemingly minor matter came to him. “Why—um. Why can’t he talk?”

“The scanner detected no vocals to implement during your sleep vision. Had you upgraded to a higher level rather than a trial session, perhaps the scanner would have made up for the loss.”

So it was Keith’s fault, either way. “How do I put him back?” 

This was what brought Dream Lance to lift his head up in consternation, a frown playing at those bee-stung lips.

The Unilu’s eyes darkened. “Returns or exchanges are prohibited, as I informed you before you partook. Now if there are any more concerns about services or informational requests, I would be happy to oblige, but if not—thank you for choosing us for your vision retrieval process.”

“But what am I supposed to do now?” Keith had hushed to a whisper, and a mass of defeat swirled in his chest. Dream Lance, sensitive to this, held his hand tighter.

With some pity, the Unilu gave him some final advice: “Return home, valued patron. Take the boy with you.”

 

* * *

Dream Lance was what you got if you had asked an artist to draw Real Lance from memory alone. And also if that artist was deeply besotted with him.

Besides his eyes, which were lighter and shallower than the ones Keith’s had to face nearly every day for the past year, the other differences were harder to parse out unless someone looked very closely. His brown skin was practically a golden sheen in certain lighting, like he’d been caught in a shower of gold dust. His hair was longer by half an inch, curling at the ends, and the color was off, somehow. Not quite right, but passable without further inspection. The real Lance had always been built of sharp ends and edges; Dream Lance had been ironed out, and all that was left was smooth panes.

He still hadn’t spoken a word. Keith wasn’t sure what to make of that.

After the Unilu had retreated back into the depths of the shop, Keith and Dream Lance lingered in the waiting area. Keith explicitly instructed him to stay two seats away from him at minimum, and Dream Lance obeyed, mournful at the sudden absence of contact. That was another thing—this Lance followed his every order, a sheep to his shepherd, and it pained Keith more than anything. Was this really how he dreamt Lance, his _friend?_ Unassuming and sensual? What kind of person did that make Keith?

No, he thought. That wasn’t fair. If he had known the dream would have literally come to life, he never would have allowed himself to get into the chamber in the first place. Keith wasn’t a lucid dreamer. It felt like he rarely ever dreamed. He didn’t choose this, let alone known its consequences.

What was done was done. Dream Lance existed now. There were no take backs. The Unilu told him to go home, but what was Keith supposed to do—show up with Dream Lance in tow and expect everything to go smoothly? The absurd image of two Lances piloting the Blue Lion appeared in his head. He couldn’t begin to imagine what the actual Lance would think. Keith probably wouldn’t have to reveal what context he dreamed of him in, but the simple truth was that he _dreamed_ of him, and that was already too much to unpack on its own.

Dream Lance was sitting hunched with his legs against his chest. When he saw Keith looking his way, he brightened visibly, a flower leaning towards the sun. No one had ever looked at Keith like that before in his life. To see that intimate of an emotion present on Lance’s face, of all people, left a wave of ache all over.

There was a stray suggestion that stood out amidst his brainstorm that he considered, despite the cruelty of it. The space mall, for all the trouble it’s caused in the past, wasn’t the worst of places to be left behind in, and Dream Lance, with some instruction, could pave his own path out somehow. If Keith gave him the rest of his GAC, it’d last him a day or two, enough to have found a way out, if that was what he wanted. A way to survive on his own. The thought was tempting, if only because Keith would never have to think about his mistake again. Nobody would ever have to know about the existence of a Lance that looked at Keith like he was the only thing worth seeing.

“Come on,” Keith said gently, all the while wishing it could be that simple. “The ride back to the castle is tough on an empty stomach.”

* * *

 

Keith wasn’t really sure how much Dream Lance knew about anything. He had the motor skills to pick up a fork, to chew, to use a napkin. But did he know who Shiro was? Allura? What it was like to be a Paladin of Voltron? Could he read or write? Did he think he was the _real_ Lance? These were things that could have been answered if only Keith had the foresight to have him speak, in his dreams, whatever weight those words would have had. Though, with his luck, the outcome may have been even worse.

At first, he hadn’t been sure if Dream Lance could eat, if he felt hunger like humans did, but the meals at this space diner seemed strangely appealing even to Keith, who had sworn off all edible goo alien anythings for the rest his life. Dream Lance had an appetite enough for he both of them, and Keith allowed him his picks off the menu along with a small appetizer to appease his own cravings. The only reason Keith had enough money left over for the food in the first place was because Shiro had given him his stash in hope of finding a remedy for his insomnia. Whether he’d feel obligated to bar Keith from ever borrowing his money again after this… well.

On his third serving of whatever syrupy substance they served on a platter, Dream Lance paused in the middle of eating and watched Keith watch him. He seemed to do that often, looking up or around mid-activity, checking to make sure Keith was still there beside him, near him, with him. 

Now, rather than returning back to his gooey entree, Dream Lance outstretched a hand against the side of Keith’s face with a practiced ease. His thumb rolled against the edge of Keith’s mouth, tender in a way that the Lance Keith knew never would have touched him. Once he retracted the hand, Dream Lance licked the stray goop off his finger. He topped the performance off with the same rosy smile he had been giving Keith since the sleeping chamber, smiling as though he had done nothing out of the ordinary.

Keith hoped the blush fanning his face wasn’t as red as he feared. “I—uh, I…”

Distracted again by his meal, Dream Lance continued to eat, completely unaware of the wreck he had just caused.

“Look,” Keith began, voice embarrassingly hoarse, “you can’t just do stuff like that when we’re in the castle, okay? You can’t just _touch_ me.” Seeing the dejection on Dream Lance’s face had Keith rushing to add, “Not in front of the others, at least. I guess. It’s just that they don’t have to know that you’re…”

Dream Lance was paying close attention, pretty wide eyes blinking profusely. Below the table, a bare foot wedged itself between Keith’s knees. He instinctually pushed it away, and Dream Lance pouted deeply in return.

“Enthusiastic,” Keith concluded.

His comm signaled for attention. Though they had all come in their civilian clothes, Allura had stressed the importance of vigilance through contact and insisted on the bite-sized communicators Pidge had fashioned for them.

“Yeah?”

“And the samurai lives!” Heart rate spiking, Keith spared a glance at the speaker’s dream counterpart across the table, listening in with furrowed brows. “What’d I say, Pidge? Told ya he wouldn’t leave without us. Get any of that beauty sleep, buddy?”

“Uh,” he said. “Some.”

“Sweet! Anyway, Coran and Hunk found their whatsits after, like, a forever, so we’re meeting at the rendezvous point in fifteen. Is that cool with you?”

“That’s… cool.” Keith had never felt more helpless.

“Hey, you sure you caught enough Zs, man? You don’t sound too hot.” Lance had, over the months, eased on his ridiculous rival tirade and had took it upon himself to be the team’s steaming train of support and goodwill—minus the occasional relapses. Funnily, the decline of Lance’s douchebaggery coincided with the growth of Keith’s horrendous crush timeline. There had to be some divine being at work there. 

“I’m _fine_ , Lance. See you later,” he said tersely, then in one fell swoop turned off his comm. He addressed his only companion. “Ready?” 

Dream Lance mirrored his distress, but gave no discernible answer.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter length consistency? Never heard of her. I didn’t mention it earlier but this vaguely takes place post-season two. Have some more panicky Keith! He can’t be cool all the time.

They made it to the parking lot in eight doboshes flat. If the rest were coming together anyway, Keith supposed the shock would be best dealt with at the get-go.

The entrance of the ship glided open as the sensor took him in. At the corner of his eye, he saw Dream Lance begin to stare. Although the mall had its share of oddities, Dream Lance hadn’t spared a chance to gawk at any of its splendors, ruling out one of Keith’s thousand worries that he’d actually have to explain how they had ended up in space. A sentient trash bin came to clean after their table at the diner and Dream Lance had only chewed the inside of his cheek in boredom. Now he grinned at the sprays of mist overhead meant to disinfect on entry with child-like amusement.

Then again, the castle’s pod was nothing to scoff at. At quarter the size of one of their lions and only one flimsy ballistic submachine gun for defense, the ship was a strictly non-combative craft that Keith wouldn’t have blinked twice at in the presence of his lion. But what it lacked in offense it made up in pure, unrivaled speed. That alone was something Keith undoubtedly admired. 

Its interior was as intrinsically beautiful as the architecture of the castle, lustrous and clinical. There were glass interfaces circling the walls, some lit with charts and diagrams while some slept dormant. It had been seemingly constructed to hold a large amount of passengers, and when they had begun liftoff Coran had adjusted it so that the excess seats retracted into the flooring, spaciously leaving room for the allotted four paladins of the trip. Coran had his own space at the one-man navigation control desk.

They would need to summon another seat for Dream Lance, Keith thought. Then he felt his apprehension spike. He was getting ahead of himself. There was no guarantee the team would take the existence of Dream Lance in stride. He wasn’t even sure how _he_ did. This could be some convoluted Galran plot, stemming from the first night Keith went without sleep. Infiltration was historically an effective strategy. Dream Lance could be programmed for destruction and betrayal and…

Dream Lance was lounging in Coran’s seat with his legs dangling over the armrests. It was a comical reenactment of what the real Lance had done only hours before. A little mesmerizing, the image only shattered when Dream Lance upturned one foot and Keith saw the blood.

No shoes. In his haste, Keith had forgotten Dream Lance only wore the Unilu’s shift and nothing more. The small scrapes on his soles were battered from the dash they made outside the mall, and Keith didn’t save any foresight for anything other than reaching the pod before anyone else.

Dream Lance tilted his head at the navigation interface, its default screen set on system diagnostics. The light from the screen had tinted his face blue. He didn’t give any indication he was uncomfortable.

Keith sprung towards the small container attached to the wall nearest to him, his rapid movement finally garnering attention. He pulled a cloudy flask from a rack of identical brethren and returned to where Dream Lance was watching at him with eyes too light and a face too soft.

He held out the medicine. “Put that on your feet,” Keith muttered, increasingly abashed. “You should’ve told me—” He did his best to only focus on the hands that received it. “If you get hurt like that again, you need to take care of yourself.”

Bravely, Keith met his gaze. Dream Lance was examining the tube curiously, twirling it between fingers. Keith was about to instruct him even further, but Dream Lance popped open the cap and began to dab the gel over his wounds. The cuts began to ooze some clear pus, which admittedly both Keith and Dream Lance grimaced at. Once the excess was wiped away, it revealed skin smooth as a child’s.

“Did that hurt?” he had to ask. Dream Lance shook his head. There was another thing he wanted to clarify. “Did you… feel that? When we were walking, I mean.”

This time Dream Lance paused, as if weighing the intent of the question in his head. _Do you feel pain?_ He lifted a hand and placed it over Keith’s left breast, against where his heart would be, and when he nodded, it was austere and apologetic.

Again, Keith felt something like dread surge up and swallow him. Somehow it had only just now occurred to him the gravity of what he had done: Dream Lance wasn’t a dream, no matter how much he called him that. He wasn’t a stray animal Keith could just show up with and ask Shiro to keep. He owned a heart that pumped hot blood through invisible veins. Those were real muscles that moved when he did, tendons and sinews head to toe. This dream of a boy bled the red of Keith’s lion.

Keith, for the first time since Dream Lance had woken from that chamber, purposely reciprocated affection. He put his hand over the one over his chest and held it there, feeling his heartbeat thundering in its cage.

Keith kept his voice above a whisper. “I—”

The motion sensor triggered, and the pod door slid ajar. 

“Level seven was created to be unbeatable, alright? There’s no way to get around the orc barriers with the hit points you start the maze with!”

“Only because you actually have to equip yourself with a magic weapon before the final battle, Lance, everybody with a brain knows—that?” Pidge trailed off mid-sentence, her glasses misting a little from the disinfection process. “Uh, Lance, why are there two of you?”

Lance the Original opened unhinged his jaw, closed it, and repeated. Then: “Pretty sure I’ve had this dream before.”

Keith’s hand dropped to his side.

“No,” he answered, “you haven’t.”

  

* * *

 

Lance stood unmoving in front of his dream clone with his arms crossed and his face set in solid concentration. It would have been like watching a mirror in action, except Dream Lance was still seated on Coran’s seat, as interested in the new arrivals as he had been about his own cuts, and didn’t seem at all bothered by his double towering over him.

Pidge was conducting her own vulture-like behavior from a safe distance. Keith was with her, along with Hunk and Coran, who had entered just moments after Lance and Pidge carrying a crate of used machinery parts. They had been fanned with a blanket of disbelief once they met Dream Lance. Keith thought he was ready for it all, but faced with the fact, he was keyed up to a high.

“You don’t just blindly follow an _Unilu_ , Keith,” Hunk scolded, after he had given a pathetic recount of what had actually occurred. He’d left out vital parts on purpose. “They’re black market aliens! For all we know, you could’ve been kidnapped!”

“Well, I wasn’t,” Keith replied tersely.

“It _was_ highly irresponsible of you, paladin,” added Coran, twirling his mustache as he observed Dream Lance scratch his neck. “We must practice vigilance in these harsh times.”

“Why Lance, of all people?” Pidge was the only one scrutinizing Keith along with the dream clone, and she hadn’t seemed ready to accept his reasoning as easily as the others. “Kind of random, if you ask me.”

Now, Keith had never been a spectacular liar. He couldn’t hope to hide anything without breaking sooner or later. So he did what daily life with Instructor Shirogane on Earth had taught him: he told a half-truth.

“Dreams don’t make sense. He was just there first,” Keith said. “If I slept for any longer, there’d probably be dream versions of the entire team.”

He didn’t look to see what kind of face Pidge would make at him, but he rode on the hope that she still preferred to understand technology more than human behavior.

“Just take it, dude,” Lance finally said, exasperated from a lost unspoken fight. He was holding out his dark green parka to Dream Lance, clearly annoyed. “You’re not really wearing what I’d call premium space-wear.”

Dream Lance stared blankly at the offered jacket.

“Does he not understand?” asked Coran.

Keith had a feeling he knew what this was about. “You should wear it,” he addressed Dream Lance. “It’ll get cold later.”

The gobsmacked look Lance made when Dream Lance wore the jacket seconds after that would have almost been laughable if Keith didn’t just give everyone the heaviest of clues by doing so. Seeing Dream Lance and the real Lance side by side like this only stressed their differences. In comparison, Dream Lance shone more radiant in complexion. Unreal. This Lance had never been through battle or hardship. This was the Lance born docile.

“He doesn’t talk,” concluded Lance. His volume was dialed low, as if he was around a sleeping child. “What’s up with that?”

“The Unilu said it was because I chose the trial session and not a real one. I don’t know.”

Keith could tell that he was taking this personally. Though, if he had come back to see a barely-functioning clone of himself, well—what else was there to do? Pidge made her way over to the crate that Hunk and Coran had brought over, clearly having filled her quota of human interaction for the day. Coran was still off twirling his mustache as he did, thoughts in the air as he was ought to do in these situations. It was Hunk, their realist, who corralled everyone back from the clouds.

“I think everyone’s avoiding the real question here,” started the Yellow Paladin, thick brows furrowed at the ready. “What are we going to _do_ with him?”

For Keith, the answer was simple. It was what he had been slaving over before the rest even came. “We bring him with us,” he said, just as Lance replied, short of the same kindness, “Leave him!”

Keith’s head snapped in his direction. “What?” he asked, alarmed. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“ _You’ve_ gotta be kidding _me!_ ” He waved an arm towards Dream Lance. “What, am I supposed to split Blue fifty-fifty from now on? We don’t even know if he’s on our side or not! And of all the crazy, unreal things to happen since we left our planet, the last thing I expected was to star in a telenovela where my evil twin comes in, slits my throat, hides my body, and takes over my life!”

“He’s on our side!”

“How do you know that?” Lance’s hands curled into hard fists. “He’s not even a real person. He popped out of a machine, right? He’s a whack daydream. I’m the only Lance here. Me! That’s _my_ face he’s got on! You know how it’d feel if I saw _that_ turn dark side on us? You don’t know, man. What would you know?”

“Because!” Keith exploded. He’d been holding back all day, and releasing the gates now felt like too much of a relief. “I know because he’s a part of me. He came _from_ me. He listens to what I say and knows what I know and he can _bleed_ , Lance. He _is_ a person. He can think things even if he can’t express them, but he’s just as real as we are.” His words tapered off by the end, the weight of it having expired as the moment lingered. “I did this to him. He’s my responsibility. We have to bring him.”

“Ahem,” Coran interrupted, clearing his throat. “Perhaps this is one discussion in need of a largerscope? Having Number One and the Princess’ thoughts on the matter might greatly determine your positions on the decision.”

“Yeah,” said Hunk. He looked like he’d be sick, holding a hand against his side. “Sorry, Lance, but I kind of agree with Keith here. I think it’s a little inhumane to just—abandon him like that. But we should check up with Allura and Shiro first before we really decide anything.”

A shadow flitted over Lance’s features, rendering him steely and unapproachable and as cold as the ice that his lion shot at her enemies. Without a word, Lance sat on the seat he’d been sitting in on their way here and stared ahead, taciturn by all means. It was unsettling. Keith thought he’d feel better if the other boy only whined and pouted like he was inclined to whenever he got mad, but this was another side of him that he’d never seen before.

Hunk, perhaps having previously experienced a truly livid Lance, knew to stay reticent and descended to his own seat, his seatbelt activating at contact. Pidge followed suit soon after. Keith looked to Coran for help. With repose, the Altean man summoned an interface and one more seat rose from the floor. It was right beside Keith’s, and Dream Lance knew what to do without having to be told.


End file.
